The immediate first thing that should be done is that police departments should have no way of benefiting from the seized cash or assets because it creates a perverse incentive across the board for everyone in the police department to overlook transgressions. It should be held by the county/state and the interest accrued till a judge decides. If it's forfeited, it should go into the county or state public benefits program that only benefits the poorest of the poor, seniors and homeless people.
There is actually proof that this works. Using Felony Probation and Parole in a particular state as an example, at one point it went to the department that ran Probation/Parole. So the Probation/Parole Officers were encouraged to aggressively pursue getting the fees for probation/parole. Then it was changed to go to the states general fund (so the department stopped getting it effectively). MAGICALLY the officers only got encouraged to care about restitution payments and started being very blaise about failure to pay fines and fees.
The obvious thing to happen next cycle from instituting such rules: the benefits program's dedicated budget gets adjusted down by the expected value of forfeitures.
Maybe instead any money collected civil asset forfeiture should be required to be sent to the Federal Reserve where it is destroyed. That should prevent any of these sorts of perverse incentives.
For money that could work. For other assets (e.g. art, anything that has an environmental cost to create it) society may benefit from them being preserved. I guess you could still auction them off and burn the money.
